Olive Dance

On Saturday morning after the roses were pruned, Mabel came outside from Grandma's kitchen with half an olive stuck on each of her two pointy fingers. At first she wanted to feed them to me, but when I said they looked too cute to eat, she made up a dance with them instead.

Reverse Christmas

Christmas in Sepia

Pigeons

I was walking from the Museum of Modern Art on 3rd & Mission through the Union Square part of downtown and on up the slope beyond (in the cold and foggy Friday afternoon air) toward my favorite engagement of the week (with my granddaughter) when I saw these pigeons, aiming for and landing on the ornamental ledge of a rather fancy unoccupied 1920s-era building across the street. I expect it will be occupied soon, now that fewer and fewer of the commercial street-front spaces anywhere near downtown San Francisco are empty.

There is a NEW BOOM obvious all over town these days, and my son-in-law mockingly and humorously told me that he has heard many people saying that THIS boom is REALLY DIFFERENT from the LAST boom because it is BUILT on something SOLID and therefore we need not expect another CRASH such as we have seen after every other local, national or international BOOM throughout recorded history.

After he said this we both laughed and laughed at the obvious falsehoods people are willing and eager to tell themselves and others.

Sendak

Mabel Watson Payne recently picked from her own shelf and asked me to read one of the earliest Little Bear books – a series I originally read with my daughter in the late 70s and early 80s. Both author and artist died just this year after long productive lives. Else Holmelund Minarik (1920-2012) wrote the stories and Maurice Sendak (1928-2012) made the pictures.

It was a shock just now to discover that the first Little Bear was published in 1957 – when I was only five years old. How odd that I belonged to the exact generation of children for whom this work was conceived. Odd and heartbreaking, if one's heart could still break over ancient deprivations. My family did not own books, except for certain gaudy and pious collections of Bible stories. It would be another quarter century before I would have the chance independently to discover the Sendak/Minarik masterpieces.

My daughter and I read the Little Bear books many hundreds of times, even long after she could read them for herself. Reliable amusements (if we wanted amusing). Reliable comforts (if we wanted comforting). And now here is Mabel, already prompting me to launch into them all over again.

In gratefulness I sought out the handful of additional, random and dearly familiar Sendak illustrations below.

Immediately above, a portrait of the artist as a young man – still in his twenties – in New York.

Me & Mabel

Only Mabel Watson Payne knows why, but whenever I come over to her house the first thing she always does is sit me down in this particular corner (she shoves any obstructing toys or books out of the way in a reckless hurry). Then she climbs backward into my lap holding her favorite library book of the moment and snuggles up comfortably against my chest and then shows me the story page by page, keeping hold of my wrists to make sure I notice all the good parts. With this ritual completed, we can get on with whatever we might be doing that day. I was glad to find the tradition intact on Friday afternoon, after three weeks in abeyance.